By CAITLIN TILLEY – The Daily Mail
Anti-vaccine sentiment has infected almost every part of America after the Covid pandemic – from academia to politics.
But the anti-vax movement appears to have now have infiltrated the world of online sperm donation, where wannabe mothers seek out samples from men who refused to take the Covid shot.
Jonathan David Rinaldi, dubbed ‘The Sperminator’, was a prolific donor for years on the Facebook group Sperm Donation USA, the largest sperm donation group in America.
But after seeing a ‘massive increase’ in requests for sperm from unvaccinated donors, he broke off and started his own splinter group exclusively for the anti-vax.
Women searching for ‘unvaccinated sperm donors’ specify ‘no Covid vaxx’ on their posts looking to find a baby-making partner
Jonathan David Rinaldi, dubbed the ‘sperminator’, was a donor for years on the Facebook group Sperm Donation USA, before creating his own Facebook group for unvaccinated sperm donors
The group has almost 250 members and has helped many people successfully start families. The members range from young professionals, gay couples to single women from both the US and the UK. Most offer their sperm for free.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has repeatedly stated that there is no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines affect fertility and studies involving tens of millions of people have indicated the shot is safe.
But Mr Rinaldi, 44, is one of the millions of Americans who has been captured by the theory that the Covid vaccines somehow damage the reproductive system.
‘I don’t trust big government, big pharma, I don’t trust them, and I don’t need to inject myself with things that I don’t even know what it is,’ Mr Rinaldi told DailyMail.com.
Users of Mr Rinaldi’s group share this false idea, with posts linking the Covid shot to sperm death and other vaccine-related misinformation.
Cryos, one of America’s largest sperm bank, told DailyMail.com it has had ‘very few clients requesting information about unvaccinated donors.’
But anecdotally, DailyMail.com has seen new interest in unvaccinated sperm donors on Facebook groups in the US.
Women searching for ‘unvaccinated sperm donors’ specify ‘no Covid vax’ on their posts looking to find a baby-making partner.
And men identify themselves with terms like ‘unvaccinated man (sperm not modified by mRNA).’
One woman posted a photo of her positive pregnancy test following a sperm donation from an unvaccinated sperm donor with a caption: ‘One more ‘farm-raised’, ‘not Pharma-raised’ baby on its way!’
As a child, Mr Rinaldi received the MMR, polio and chicken pox vaccines. When he had his first child, he began questioning the necessity of vaccinations.
‘I’ve had no flu shots, no Covid shots. Nothing since I was a baby,’ he said.
‘My best friend growing up was not vaccinated at all. And he is totally fine and healthy,’ Mr Rinaldi said.
‘When I had my first child, I started reading the inserts and the ingredients. And when the school started saying my son had to have them… I really don’t like being told what to do by the government, so it made me think and do the opposite.’
A woman posted in the Sperm Donation USA Facebook group in July 2021 looking for unvaccinated sperm donors. ‘AI’ refers to artificial insemination, which involves a donor providing his sperm in a cup or shipping it to a recipient
Unvaccinated sperm donors offer their services in the unvaccinated splinter group
A man who was conceived himself using sperm donation offers to be a sperm donor in the splinter Facebook group. Like others in the group, he believes the Covid vaccine will modify sperm
Mr Rinaldi, from Forest Hills in New York, first began donating sperm when a lesbian friend of his asked if he would help her conceive a child.
He now has three children with his ex-partner and 16 others conceived through sperm donation.
In a ‘perfect world’, the women he donates sperm to would also be unvaccinated, he said.
‘But the reality of it is, not everybody believes in that. Not everybody’s educated,’ he said. ‘I would love it if no one got vaccinated.’
One woman Mr Rinaldi was considering donating his sperm to had received both her Covid shots, and was thinking about getting her booster.
‘And I was like, “Listen, if you get the booster, I’m not doing this for you. Like, it’s bad enough, you have two of them.”‘
In December 2020, a discredited German epidemiologist spearheaded a theory that the Covid vaccines might make women’s bodies reject a protein connected to the placenta, therefore making them infertile.
The theory spread like wildfire on social media.
He thought this because the genetic code of the placenta protein, called syncytin-1, shares a hint of similarity with the genetic code of the spike protein in Covid-19.
His argument was that if the vaccines caused our bodies to make antibodies to protect us from Covid, they could also make antibodies to reject the placenta.
This theory was swiftly disproven in clinical trials and continues to be refuted in real time as more and more fully vaccinated women become pregnant.
A study published last year of more than 2,000 females aged 21-45 years and their partners found that Covid-19 vaccination of either partner did not affect the likelihood of becoming pregnant.
In 2020, Cryos carried out a scientific study investigating if the Covid virus can be passed on between sexual partners.
‘Reassuringly, the Cryos study shows that the infection cannot be transmitted through semen,’ it said.
One study found that Covid-19 infection may be linked with a decrease in fertility for men for up to 60 days after infection.
Fever from any illness has been linked in the past with a short-term decline in sperm.
‘There is absolutely no reason to be worried about fertility with the Covid-19 vaccine,’ said Dr Lanny Wilson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Avalon University School of Medicine in Youngstown, Ohio, emphasizing that vaccines ‘do not cause infertility and they do not affect fertility one way or the other.’